What happens when the “air bag” that is your college degree does not deploy?

In the months before the 2020 presidential election, I began to wonder if I was missing something. Both candidates declared that they were engaged in a battle of good versus evil. I had my opinion, but I was wondering: Why did many individuals who were right-of-center see Trump as good and Biden as evil?

So I talked to four white cisgender men who were Trump supporters, all of whom had been my students when I was a chaplain in the 1990s in upstate New York and the mid-2000s outside of Boston. I nicknamed these former students “the Four Horsemen” and spent time trying to listen to their concerns. The first one told me of a story when he spoke to an audience and thought he had been using measured, reasonable speech. But he was accused of being oppressive and was eventually pushed out of the community. 

The second had become uncomfortable in his neighborhood, which was full of high school and college educators. He was learning to not have certain conversations anymore. He felt loyal to some of the values Trump championed, but he was becoming more uncomfortable with Trump’s views and behaviors. 

The third student was recovering from the economic instability that followed the Great Recession. He had become more religious, and part of that shift included a political one to the right. He also did not want to talk about politics — he did talk a lot about the struggles of raising a family, financial difficulties, disappointments in life, and broken dreams. 

The fourth horseman said that Trump made him feel empowered, and that he was looking forward to the changes that would come with a second Trump administration. He showed me a lot of YouTube videos that were mocking Biden, wokeness, and political correctness. 

The election came and went, Biden won, and I stopped talking politics with these men. 

I did not understand why these men supported Trump until I learned the research of Anne Case and Angus Deaton, two Princeton economists, who described in a New York Times op-ed “a deep and persistent national malcontent,” especially among non-college-educated persons.

Case and Deaton looked at possible reasons behind the decline in U.S. life expectancy, which first began to flatline in 2010 and fell significantly  in both 2020 and 2021. A major contributor is deaths related to drug and alcohol use and suicide, which the two economists call “deaths of despair.” Case and Deaton connect these deaths of despair with the deterioration of job and education prospects for many U.S. citizens who entered adulthood after 1970. 

While the Four Horsemen all had college degrees, they all seemed to share the same despair that non-college-educated people held about U.S. society. Case and Deaton’s analysis finds that U.S. citizens with degrees are flourishing, while those without four-year degrees are not. What if this is not quite the entire picture? 

While Case and Deaton are looking at the link between deaths of despair and lack of education, I am wondering if there is another phenomenon we should be looking at — what is happening to people with college degrees whose lives are not as fulfilling as expected? What happens when the college degree leaves you more in debt, or limits your ability to find a life partner, or if the job prospects simply never materialize? 

All of the Four Horsemen have advanced degrees (three hold doctorates), but two are now working in jobs that pay below the average for white men with the same level of education. 

Does this mean that college degrees are not protecting people from the kind of despair experienced by people with less education and job prospects?

What we need to do is to talk more about these experiences. However, my concern is that we have stopped having in-depth conversations because we are so overwhelmed with our personal lives, or trying to navigate many global crises. Moving through these questions and the polarization that may be fueling our societal despair requires conversations, preferably in safe contexts that minimize canceling people for disagreement. 

Rev. Valerie Bailey Fischer is Chaplain to the College and the Protestant Chaplain.